Hey everybody. Welcome to Secrets to Candidate Success with Camille and Kierra. Secrets to Candidate success is dedicated to helping candidates understand the process from a recruiter’s perspective. In this segment, we’ll be sharing tips and tricks as we experienced them. So we wanted to talk a little bit about what keeps an employee from resigning from their role.
So Kierra, would you share with me just a few reasons that people might leave their jobs? Yeah, so I recently made a post just asking people what are some reasons that you’ve left a job or a role? And I got a lot of responses about lack of trust, not much flexibility, not much empathy or growth opportunities, being micromanaged or having bad management.
I do think management is a big thing. So if you aren’t feeling like your management is listening to you, that can really make or break your experience. Lack of training. People were promised that they were going to have training and onboarding and weren’t given that, so they weren’t be able to be successful in their role.
I’ve heard that people leave because of culture. And then work life balance, just either being overworked or not communicated with the types of responsibilities that they were going to have. And those are just a few. There are so many other reasons that people leave, but on my recent post, that’s just what some people had commented. So what do you think are some things that are important to consider when searching for a job that’s going to be important in your success at that role or with that company?
Yeah, definitely. I think looking for like a positive, supportive culture is really important. I think people stay at their jobs when they really enjoy the culture.
They’re supportive, it’s positive. They enjoy coming to work, as well as getting along with their coworkers, being able to connect with them as well as transparency and that can be from leadership, that can be from your coworkers, maybe partners or customers that you’re working with, as well as opportunity for growth.
I think it’s always important to look for when you’re starting a new role and just ask about opportunities to be promoted. Is there a clear line of growth? That’s a lot of reasons that people leave jobs, is because there’s no opportunity to grow, no opportunity to make more money.
And just to learn more. But I think the biggest ones are probably like reasons for money. So maybe there’s no merit increase, maybe there’s no bonus, maybe there’s no pay increase at any point in promotions and really just like paid time off all of those good benefits that you have. I think because it’s ever changing. I think more companies start offering unlimited PTO so that could definitely make someone want to leave their current role.
Yeah, and like some of the points that you made when I was transitioning out of teaching, those were a lot of reasons why I left as well. The lack of growth, the money. A lot of like the PTO, they say that teachers get their summers off and whatnot. But in order to make the type of money that you need to support yourself, you have to work over the summer. So there’s just a lot of reasons that I think go into why a company could be a good fit or a career could be a good fit. So I think there’s a lot of different types of questions that you can ask when interviewing and talking to recruiters that will kind of display an idea of what the type of environment you’ll be working in. And what are some of those questions that you can think of off the top of your head that we could maybe help candidates with asking to know that this role’s going to be a good fit or not?
Yeah, I think one of the most important ones right now, with all the layoffs going on, you can ask them if they had done layoffs at any time during Covid or recently, and what they’re currently doing now to prevent that, just because you don’t want to be going into a new role with the chance of being laid off and losing your job.
So you really want to know what the leadership team is doing to prevent that from happening. Also, an important thing is, if PTO is important to you, you can also ask about how that’s handled. Like do you request it? Is it always accepted? Is it up to like performance, the team? Is someone else off and there needs coverage? There’s a lot of things that can go beyond for that, so that’s important. And just really how feedback is given from a manager to a direct report. I think that’s really important. A lot of times in companies, they’ll expect you to know certain metrics or like feedback or things that are expected without telling you. So knowing like the clear line of communication and transparency is really important as well.
Yeah. Something that really stood out to me was when layoffs are done, like what are they doing to prevent it? Because I know a big fear in the market right now of people leaving their current role is that they’re going to be the first to get let go if layoffs do occur because of the tenure that they would have at that company.
So I think that’s a big piece to kind of think about and talk through with the company and see what they’re doing to make sure that doesn’t happen. Because I know that is a fear for a lot of candidates. So I think that’s something to definitely consider. I would also ask about like, can you give me some examples of the culture that you have at your company? Explain it to me. I know I did that when I was right out of college searching for my first job because culture was the most important to me. I wanted to work with people who enjoyed their job and who also enjoyed working with each other. Because when you’re in a negative environment, it can affect so many things, including your mental health, which is so important, especially to talk about even today.
And then what are some examples of people? Why are people leaving your company? You’re going to want to know, are people leaving the company because it’s not a good fit, or are they leaving for growth opportunities? Like, what are the reasons that they’re leaving? I think that can tell you a lot about the role, the company, the culture, because people aren’t going to leave if they’re happy. Right? So a lot of what I’ve seen is that if people are treated well, if people are getting exactly what they were told and what is expected, and having that communication and transparency, they’re not going to leave a role that they’re happy with. So you want to make sure that all of these questions are answered either throughout the interview process or with the recruiter, just so that you can really get a clear idea of what you’re getting into. Did you have any other ones that you could think of?
Yeah, I wanted to add, I think probably the most important one is when you’re interviewing for a role, the first question on the phone screen that you should ask the recruiter is if it’s a backfill or if this person was internally promoted, maybe they left the company, and kind of dig into why that person left and try to figure out if that’s something that would be a problem to you as well.
Maybe there was like no promotion, no line of growth, anything like that. So I think that’s really important to note and when you ask these questions, there could be potential red flags. So if the hiring manager, if the recruiter, any interviewer gets defensive, like take note of that and just make sure you remember that. Because I think it is important to ask these questions about people leaving the company what they could have done differently. I think it’s really important and the company will show its true colors if you press them with the right questions.
Yeah, and in previous videos we’ve talked about how you can find out reviews ahead of time for companies, so you can go check out some of our previous content to kind of figure out where you can find that information.
So thank you so much for joining us today. Remember to check out all of our content on talentinsights.hirewell.com, and follow us on LinkedIn. Have a wonderful rest of the day, and if you haven’t already, you should check out our brand new website at Hirewell.com. Thanks. Thank you.
